Artist Biography
Photograph by Jesse Vo
Ruby Swinney (b. 1992) is a painter working primarily in oil on silk and tracing paper. Her practice explores themes of alienation, ecology, and spiritual estrangement, creating dreamlike worlds where time feels suspended and figures appear as ghostly presences within luminous, natural landscapes.
Swinney’s work is rooted in a deep sense of liminality—of existing between worlds. Born and raised in South Africa, she describes herself as an “alien” within her own country: a product of postcolonial rule, a ghost of the past, belonging fully to neither England nor Africa. This in-between state, shaped by history, inherited identity, and displacement, informs the emotional and symbolic language of her paintings. Her figures often inhabit eerie, atmospheric spaces that reflect both personal and collective histories—places where the boundaries between the human and natural, the physical and spiritual, begin to dissolve.
Working from altered photographs and visual references, Swinney uses painting as a tool for both image-making and world-making. Through layers of monochromatic colour, she evokes the uncanny beauty of nature while drawing attention to our growing disconnection from it. Her use of religious iconography—haloes, cruciform shapes, altarpiece compositions—adds to the sacred, otherworldly quality of her imagery, suggesting realms beyond the visible.
Her interests span ecological consciousness, digital mediation, altered states of being, and the philosophy of art. What emerges is a body of work that sits between memory and myth, reverie and reality.
Swinney graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2015. Since then, she has presented seven solo exhibitions, including Ignis Fatuus (2017) and Hold Still (2019) at WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town; Human Nature (2018) at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA); and her international debut The Distance Between Us (2021) at AKINCI Gallery, Amsterdam, followed by Floating World (2022) and Amid the Alien Corn (2024).
Her work is included in public and private collections, including the Zeitz MOCAA and Colleción SOLO Museum, Madrid. In 2024, she relocated to London, where she currently lives and works.